Bury My Heart
by Kthonia
Summary: Not based on the movie, but the 1950s TV show, except there is no category for it there! Story is set long after the show ended. It's Christmastime 1899, and the Lone Ranger is an old man who has given up his mask. But there's a promise to keep to an old friend and one more outlaw to chase down.
1. Chapter 1

BURY MY HEART

Chapter 1

The brass bell jingled on the print shop's telephone. Dan Reid wiped his pencil-stained fingers on his burlap apron as he got up to answer the call.

He had been proofreading a letter-to-the-editor about the President McKinley's upcoming re-election campaign. Life was good that Christmas season of 1899. Decades of a topsy-turvy economy and bouts of financial panic were solidly behind them, and a new age of prosperity glowed before the American people like a sunrise on the horizon. The _Daily Sentinel_ that Dan Reid edited was getting downright dull lately. No big labor strikes and union riots in East Coast factories. No more heated editorials arguing for or against the United States becoming an imperial power, now that the Philippine islands had been annexed back in February and the soldiers were coming home. No more cattle, sheep, and homestead wars in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. And definitely no Indian news to report, with Sitting Bull long dead and Geronimo safely locked away.

He walked to the rear of the print shop, passing rows of typists pecking at their Remingtons. A burly bearded man was cleaning and oiling the Linotype machine—a genuine Merganthaler Base Model I, a behemoth of a machine the size of two upright pianos strapped back to back

Dan plucked the wall-mounted telephone's horn off its hook. By habit, he leaned an elbow into the back wall as he slouched over the mouthpiece.

"Yep, Reid here."

"Danny? Are you busy? Can you come home?" Betsy, his wife, sounded worried.

"What's wrong, sweetheart?"

"Nothing really, Danny. Just it's that we've got us an unexpected visitor. A fella says he's your Uncle John."

"My Uncle John?" Dan blinked his pale blue eyes. "Naw, you must've got it wrong. I don't have an Uncle John, Betsy, not even on my mother's side. You must mean my cousin Hannah's husband."

"No, he said uncle. I'm sure of it. Says he's your Uncle John from Texas."

Shame and shock burned his cheeks. It was a ghost from the past, another life, another time. How could he forget who John Reid was? Because for practically Dan's whole life, he had known his late father's younger brother by another name: The Lone Ranger.

##

Dan Reid pedaled the bicycle hard through street traffic. He dodged carriages and splashed mud to women's long skirts. Horses neighed their alarm. Mothers snatched their children out of his way.

On the edge of this quiet Southern California town lay a row of two-story gabled houses. The Reid's house was the white-and-green one at the end. Picket fences caged in a square lot full of rose bushes and crab grass. A stray cat mewed, startled, and dashed away as he rolled to a stop.

Dan Reid dumped his bicycle on the flagstones leading up to the covered porch. He took the steps in one leap.

Betsy Reid caught her husband at the threshold. He breathed so hard that he couldn't talk. She held him by the shoulders to steady him and looked him stern in the eye. Betsy was of Scots-Irish stock from the Appalachian mountains, and in her high-button shoes she equaled her husband in height. She wore a lead-colored skirt, a pin-striped blouse, and a cloisonné brooch at her throat, so the only color on her entire person was her upswept waves of auburn hair.

"He's in the sittin' room," she said, her Kentucky accent more noticeable in her excitement.

Dan slipped out of her strong hands and entered the parlor.

After his exhausting bicycle ride across town, he felt flushed and his heart raced. He could hardly breathe the stifled air heavy with the musk of cross-stitched upholstery and woolen Navajo rugs. The oak walls of the narrow corridor were always dark, as the incandescent light bulbs that replaced kerosene lamps went un-used; Betsy was afraid of electricity.

As Dan plunged into the parlor, he nearly keeled over from the strong blast of conflicting odors: black tea, cinnamon, perfumed lace doilies, and a sweat-soaked horseman.

"Do you play?" asked an older man who sat hunched on the sofa.

Glancing to the upright piano shrouded in beige lace, Dan Reid shook his head. "My son will start lessons after the New Year…. Uncle John?"

Thin and shrunken, his shoulders slumped, his frock coat hung in ill-fitting folds. Knobby knees pinched together, he nursed a cup of tea. A salt-and-pepper beard obscured the lower half of his face. Round black spectacles replaced his former mask. The only part of his flesh that showed was the sharp tip of a nose and a high forehead gaining ground over his receding hairline of white curls.

"Merry Christmas, Dan," the old man said.

The clock on the mantle gave a _ping_ to signal the half hour before noon.

Dan settled onto a straight-backed chair in between the piano and the tea table. "I thought you were dead."

"It's a nice home you've got here. What a lovely wife. When did you get married?"

"Back in Ninety-two," Dan said.

"Congratulations. Do you have children?"

"Two. Uh, one. I've a son, Britt who's five. My daughter died last year in July. She was barely three. Whooping cough."

"Sorry to hear that, Dan." The old man slowly raised the blue-and-white tea cup to his beard. Still the gentleman, he made not a sound as he sipped his tea.

"Why are you here… Uncle John?" Dan could barely talk. The memories of his youth were still so fresh: a fiery white horse galloping across the open prairie, the crack of a Colt .45 pistol echoing in the desert air, a man with a black mask and a white Stetson hat.

The ranger set down his cup on the matching saucer with a muted clink of china-upon-china. Then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he brought out a folio of papers tied by frayed string.

"These are for you." He handed the heavy packet over to Dan.

"What are these?"

Dan untied the string and unfolded yellow papers in his lap. He squinted at the grandiose cursive handwriting in the old style, where the s's looked like f's. He judged it to be half a century old, or more.

"On top is the deed to a hundred forty acres in southern Indiana that belonged to your grandfather. Tenants live there now, honest folks, farmers who pay their rent to the bank. The rent goes into an account jointly held in my name and yours."

Flipping through the pages by the corners, Dan identified more real estate property deeds in Kansas, in Oklahoma, in Nevada, in Pennsylvania, in eastern Massachusetts, and in Long Island New York. Although the family bible had been lost years ago, Dan recalled his father's stories of the Reids being among the first wave of permanent settlers after the _Mayflower_.

"And this?" Dan picked up the bottom leaflet.

"Oh, that." The ranger coughed dry. "That's title to the silver mine."

"The silver mine? Your…? _That_ silver mine?"

"You've got the title papers and contact for the bank in Abilene that manages the operation. I think they've installed a telephone by now. I'm sorry, I don't know what its assets are worth right now. The price of silver goes up and down with the phases of the moon, these days. You may want to have it appraised."

Dan put the bundle of papers on the tea table, nudging aside a pair of glass doves and a tray of little mint candies. He leaned forward over his knees and peered intently through the spectacles masking the old man's eyes. Twinkles of clear blue irises eyed his nephew guardedly.

"Do you ever wear the….?" Dan gestured to his face.

"No. I took it off nearly ten years ago."

"I guess I never thought I'd see the day. What happened to you?"

"I got old."

"You're only fifty-nine going on sixty next April, if I remember right. That ain't so old. Hell, the banker holding my mortgage is a proud sixty-eight."

The ranger looked down at his pale freckled hands. "I'm fresh out of silver bullets."

_I've still got mine,_ Dan wanted to say but didn't. He glanced to the locked music box on the fireplace mantle.

"My investments should be in your hands, not in my saddle bags. You can keep the properties for the rental income or sell them for the cash if you need to."

"But Ranger—"

"Don't call me that!" The old man snapped a pointer finger erect. "Don't ever, ever call me that. No one alive but you, Dan, knows me for anything but your wandering hobo of an uncle from Texas."

That said, the ranger rose off the sofa. He ambled with the stiff bow-legged gait of a man who had spent most of his life in a saddle.

Dan walked his uncle down the narrow hallway, around the bulging banister of the crescent staircase, and to the front door. A stained glass oval window glittered rainbow colors on the throw rug. He took his uncle's canvas duster from the wall hook. The coat was still damp in the shoulders from the rain that had lightly sprinkled that morning.

"Uncle John, aren't you going to stay a while? I can borrow set you up in our spare room."

"No, I really couldn't, Dan. You know me. I do what's needed and then I leave."

The ranger tapped on a small-brimmed bowler hat atop his receding hairline. He opened the front door for himself, and Dan dogged his steps. Their mismatched shoes clumped loudly on the hollow boards of the wraparound porch: a trail-worn pair of riding boots and a sensible pair of city loafers.

An idea bolted into Dan's mind, and he seized his uncle's elbow. "My god. You said, 'no one alive.' No one alive knows you were…. My god."

"What, Dan?"

The ranger kept walking toward the dappled gelding that awaited him, hitched to the iron post by the porch.

"Tonto?" he whispered. "Where is he? Why isn't he with you?"

"He's dead."

Dan Reid let go of the overcoat's sleeve, let the ranger walk forward a few steps, and watched dumb-founded as Uncle John mounted his unspectacular horse. Dan shaded his eyes. He saw in the halo of sun-blurred illusion the man he used to be. For that brief, fleeting instant, as the old man settled into the stirrups, and with the wintry sun gleaming on the brim of his beige hat, he was the Lone Ranger riding again.

"Why? How? When?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Please, Uncle John. He was my friend too!"

"I said, I don't want to talk about it. I'll ask you to respect that." His voice had a hard edge to it now, a sternness reserved for facing-off a drunken bank robber who'd just busted up a saloon and shot the piano player.

Though he was family, Dan felt a shudder at that voice. "Sorry."

Old John Reid gathered up the reins in his hands and turned his horse toward the gate of the picket fence. "No, I'm the one to apologize for snapping at you, Dan. It was exactly nine years ago, this month. You'd think I'd be over it by now."

"How….?"

"He was shot by cavalry soldiers in South Dakota, at a frozen creek outside the Pine Ridge Reservation, along with a couple hundred other innocent people."

"Wounded Knee," Dan whispered. He had done the typesetting for the newspaper when the story broke.

"I took off my mask, then and there. I threw it into the ditch with the pile of bodies. It's buried with him."

With a nudge of his knee and a cluck of his tongue, the ranger coaxed his mild horse into an ambling gait. The loose tail swished back and forth like a broom.

Dan Reid stood in his own front yard, purchased free-and-clear, in his peaceful town, just a shout away from his loving wife and his five-year-old son, where until this moment he had rejoiced in each new day. He watched the broken man go away down the street. He could only imagine what the Lone Ranger must have seen in the blizzard snows of South Dakota nine years before.

"My god," Dan said to the trio of blackbirds whistling on the leafless branches of a pear tree. "Tonto. Wounded Knee."


	2. Chapter 2

Dan Reid got into the liquor cabinet and uncorked the bourbon. He chugged down a jigger straight, then doubled over to cough and wheeze at the fumes of fire in his throat. When he'd barely managed to catch his breath, he poured another.

"Daniel Thomas Reid," his wife barked from the doorway of the parlor. "Just what in tarnation do you think you're doing?"

Betsy Reid charged at him in a loud swish of petticoats and a twinkle of a necklace watch pinned to her blouse. She seized the bourbon out of his hands. "Drinkin' hard liquor at high noon. What's gotten into you?"

"Uncle John brought me some tragic news. A friend is dead."

"You've known people who died before." She paused meaningfully. A small silence ensued that should have been filled by a tiny girl's laughter, a sound that would never again be heard in this house. "You've never gone off on a drinking binge."

Dan couldn't answer her.

"And where has your uncle gone to? I heated up a bowl of your favorite Texas chili and a big square of corn bread just for him."

Dan crossed the parlor to avoid her, but found the very act of walking to be a little harder than it had been a few minutes before. He gripped the fireplace mantle and stared at the locked music box next to the clock. Inside, on a cushion of red velvet, lay the silver-plated lead bullet the Lone Ranger had once given him. Dan could see it in his memory as clearly as if he'd unlocked the box and held it in his fingertips. Had it tarnished over the years, he wondered. Did it need polishing like the set of English cutlery handed down from Betsy's grandmother.

"It's his way. He never sticks around long. Never settles down."

"Bah," she huffed. "All that lone cowboy nonsense?"

"Something like that."

Betsy noticed the packet of papers on the tea table. Hand on her hip, she asked, "What are those?"

"The deeds and titles to some of his properties in various spots all over the country. They're all mine, now."

She unfolded them carefully, one-by-one, and silently mouthed the words as she read what they were. "Good Lord in Heaven. Dan, I don't understand how he can give this all away. This is inheritance we're talking, here. Don't take this the wrong way, but that uncle of yours sure looked like he needed money more than we do."

"He probably does, but he wouldn't ever take a penny from me."

"How will he survive? Honestly, Dan, a man just can't live off the land anymore. There is no more frontier."

"He'll make due. What I'm worried about is, he's so alone. He never had someone like you." Dan invited her with his arm, and Betsy walked into his side. She rested her pink powdered cheek upon his shoulder.

"He never fell in love?" she asked.

"Ain't too many women out on the cattle trails and the barren plains where the coyotes howl and the buffalo once roamed free."

Betsy chuckled softly. "I haven't heard you talk cowboy in years. That uncle of yours, barely here an hour, and look what he's done to you."

"I used to ride with him when I was younger. Before I met you."

"You never told me that."

Dan fingered the empty keyhole on the locked music box. "He was a kind of lawman."

"Really?"

"Yeah…. he was a Texas Ranger with my father. We had some thrilling times together. Brought more horse thieves and murderous outlaws in to justice than you can count. Though it was only a year, maybe two, that I rode with him. Felt like the biggest and best part of my life. Until I met you."

Betsy stroked the starched points of his shirt's collar. "So, the friend who died was one of these rangers?"

"No. He was an Indian."

"Oh, a scout?" she asked. "A translator?"

"No. Not really. Oh Betsy, how could they just shoot him?"

"Who shot him?"

"Goddamned cavalry." Dan saw her cheeks blush to bright rose, and he rapidly apologized, "Sorry. Forgive me for taking the Lord's name in vain. It's just, when I was starting out as a journalist, I covered that story for the Kansas City papers. I _know_ what happened out there at Wounded Knee Creek. I saw the photographs. Hundreds of sick, starving, exhausted old people, and women and children, gunned down in the snow for no reason. With tripod-mounted Hotchkiss guns, no less. You crank the handle, and they fire hundreds of bullets a second. How could those soldiers chew up a crowd of unarmed people, just after Christmas no less?"

"It was horrible," Betsy said.

"To think that the man I rode with… The man I trusted like a brother… The man I respected for his courage, his forbearance and his integrity… That he was among them, doing what he always did, maybe trying to help innocent people…."

Dan sagged against the fireplace mantle and wept like a child. Grief and anger had its way with him, raking his body and spirit until he had no more tears to give. The clock sang out the carol of London's Big Ben and then chimed twelve times. Dan took several quavering breaths to come back to normal.

He raised his glass to the clock. "For Tonto, may he rest in peace."

"Tonto?" she gasped.

"Uh-huh."

Betsy whirled away from him. "A Texas Ranger? A silver mine? It couldn't be. Your uncle couldn't possibly be."

"Be what, Betsy?" he asked.

She grasped the cloisonné brooch at her throat. "Your uncle was the Lone Ranger?"

Dan shook his head to deny it, but out of his mouth came the biggest secret of his life. "Yes."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 2

Back at the newspaper, Dan hunched over his writing desk to pencil-edit the editorial opinion letter. It was hard to muster enthusiasm for President McKinley's re-election now, and harder to feel inspired by the writer's glowing praise - the president for the 20th Century. In twelve days, it would be a new year and a new century, but Dan Reid's mind was firmly entrenched in the past.

Photographs from the Wounded Knee massacre haunted his mind, still as clear and fresh as if they were spread out on his desk at this moment. Thank god film was black-and-white, he thought. The crumpled heaps of dark clothing in the snow, bodies frozen twisted into grotesque contortions, their open-mouthed faces silently crying the injustice. They had rags instead of shoes wrapped around their feet for a blizzard in South Dakota. So many newspapers at the time had applauded the victory of the cavalry over these renegades. Some editorials had accused individual Indians of being those who had massacred General Custer and his men at Little Bighorn. Others had lauded the supremacy of Christian soldiers over those who had turned away from Jesus and participated in Satanic ghost dances which hoped to raise the dead and annihilate the white man. Dan Reid had written a pro-Indian piece that was never printed. Someone on staff at the newspaper sent him anonymous death threats; he never found out who.

"My God," he whispered. _Tonto._

The front door slapped open. George Striker, his most prolific reporter, ran inside like the devil himself was on his heels.

"Murder!" George shouted. "Dan, there's been a murder!"

Every typewriter fell silent. Every face in the shop looked up.

Dan Reid got up unsteadily, still light-headed from the earlier shot of bourbon. "Who's been murdered?"

George Striker looked wild and flushed from running, a strand of blond hair loose over his forehead. "Down at the boarding house. A traveling salesman. Came into town last week, taking catalog orders for sewing machines out of New York. Mrs. Wagner went upstairs to check on him when he didn't come down for breakfast or lunch, and she found him dead in his bed. Throat slashed. Blood everywhere."

Dan Reid swallowed, feeling queasy at the image.

Striker waved a notepad. "I got all the details I could before the sheriff chased me off!"

"Get to work." Dan slapped his reporter's shoulder to aim him at the nearest typewriter. "Have it for me by the evening edition."

##

Dan Reid walked instead of bicycled up the street to the sheriff's office. Quite a crowd had gathered outside the door already, the shopkeepers and regular folks all shouting at the windows, "What are you going to do about it?" Mutterings in the crowd spoke of another Jack the Ripper, here in our little town.

"Excuse me. Pardon me." Dan squirmed his way through the tightly packed shoulders.

When he showed his face at the door, the sheriff's deputy opened it just a crack. The crowd swelled like a wave as Dan slipped inside. The door's frail frame rattled shut, and panes of rippled glass muted the crowd's fearful voices.

"Reid." The sheriff said his name like a curse. "I sent your reporter packing. I'd expected you to figure I don't want this case spread all over the county by your goddamned newspaper."

Sheriff Robert Kelly was a long string of beef jerky for a man. He dressed in a leather vest and cowboy boots with pointed steel tips like the Virginian in Owen Wister's popular novel. The sheriff sucked a fat cigar and hung a thumb in his gun belt. Here was a man who took the Lord's name in vain when saying good morning to his wife over the breakfast table, and he never apologized for anything. Dan suddenly pitied the murderer for whenever Sheriff Kelly would catch up to him.

"I thought I could help."

"You can help by getting the hell out of my office."

Dan Reid folded his arms and stood his ground. "My father was a Texas Ranger. I've rode with posses before."

"I ain't forming no goddamned posse, Reid. I've got nothin' to chase. I've got a dead body and no witnesses. I've got shit."

"This man was a traveling salesman, right? He just came into town a week ago. Who would want to kill a man who peddles sewing machines?"

Sheriff Kelly mouthed his fat cigar while eying Dan Reid suspiciously. "We're gonna start by interviewing all the strangers that have come into town, taking rooms at the boardinghouse, hanging out at the saloon."

Dan nodded. "That's a good idea."

"Didn't you have a visitor this morning?"

"Yes." Dan paused to choose his words carefully. "My Uncle John."

"Your uncle comes to visit, stays two hours and leaves? That sounds pretty damned peculiar."

"Not if you know my uncle."

"Where's he live?" the sheriff asked.

"I don't know."

"Where's he goin' to?"

"Don't know."

"Why'd he come see you?"

"Personal business," Dan said.

The sheriff walked slowly from one corner of his desk to the other. "Has your uncle ever killed a man?"

"Just what are you saying, Sheriff?"

"Most people would easily say _no_ to that question, Reid. I find it very interesting that you chose to-"

"No," Dan interrupted. "He never killed a man. He made a point of shooting outlaws to wound or disarm, just so he could bring 'em to the law."

"A Texas Ranger, like your father?"

"No, not officially. More of a kind of vigilante you might say." Dan winced at his word choice when he saw the sheriff's expression darken. "But not really what you'd think of as a vigilante. Maybe more like a bounty hunter."

"'Like' a bounty hunter?"

"He, sort of, never actually took payment for the wanted men he brought in."

The sheriff turned to the fellow next to him—the biggest, dumbest sharp shooter in town. "Deputy Yarnell, go catch up with that son-of-a-bitch. Bring him the hell in here."

"I'm on it." Yarnell pushed his way out the door and through the crowd like a bucking bull launching into a rodeo arena.

"Sheriff, please, he's my uncle. I'll vouch for him."

"Once a man's turned vigilante, he never stops being one. I'm thinkin', maybe he set his sights on this traveling salesman. Maybe thought the poor bastard resembled some outlaw in a wanted poster. Maybe he thought it's time in his life to start taking payment."

Dan Reid's jaw slackened. "You can't be serious. My Uncle John would never sneak up on a man and cut his throat. He loves the law more than his own life."

"Well then, he should be thrilled, 'cause the law and him is about to get reacquainted."


	4. Chapter 4

Dan Reid waited in the sheriff's office for about an hour, hoping the deputy would come back and say he'd lost him. What buck-toothed farmer's son could hope to catch up to the Lone Ranger? Dan knew he should be getting back to the newspaper office, to edit Striker's article and have it type-set on the Merganthaler Model I by the evening edition. Time was short. But he couldn't leave the sheriff until he was sure.

The door opened. Dan tensed. Then he saw the town's portrait photographer enter, and he relaxed.

Albert Coulson photographed young couples on their wedding day and took landscape pictures of the town's landmarks that were framed and hung in City Hall. The mayor, the sheriff, the bankers, and even Dan Reid had all taken turns sitting in front of Coulson's lens and holding their breath for the flash of powder. The new Kodak cameras were hurting his business—now anybody could take snapshots—but somehow Coulson maintained his appearance as a dapper gentleman.

Coulson laid a packet of black-and-white photos on the sheriff's desk. "They came out perfectly!" he said, delighted and utterly unaffected by the grisly images. He sang his words with a childish pride, though he was certainly no child. "You can see every detail. I took several angles for you."

Sheriff Kelly frowned into the glossy prints. "These look great, Bert. Thanks."

"I think you'll be especially interested in this close-up view of the throat. You can see exactly where the murderer sliced downward at a roughly forty-five degree angle."

"Yeah," the sheriff said. "So the killer faced him, standing at the right side of the bed. Why aren't there footprints in the blood?"

Coulson smiled and pointed with his left hand. "I thought of that, too. I made sure to take a shot of the floor by the bed. Nope, no footprints. Mrs. Wagner wants to know when you'll allow her Chinese boys to clean it up?"

"Deputy's gone on an errand. Should be back soon."

"Sheriff," Reid said. "Maybe you shouldn't be in such a rush to clean it up. Maybe there are more clues."

"I know you, Reid. Just lookin' to snoop around and get more gory details to write up in your goddamned newspaper. Ain't no footprints. Ain't no knife. Ain't no witnesses. I'd say we're fu-"

Just then, the door opened for the sheriff's deputy. He dragged in a handcuffed old man disguised head-to-toe in a duster coat. John Reid was under there somewhere, concealed by his broad hat, his spectacles, and his salt-and-pepper beard.

"Uncle John," Dan exclaimed.

The sheriff shoved one of the grisly photographs at the ranger's face. "This mean anything to you?"

The water-blue eyes behind the spectacles didn't even blink. "Who was he?"

"A traveling salesman," Dan Reid supplied. "He sold sewing machines."

"What was his name?" the ranger asked.

"J.T. Bledsoe."

"Bledsoe," said the ranger, thoughtfully. "Out of Tennessee?"

"What makes you say that?"

"There are more Bledsoes than hornets in Tennessee," old John Reid told him.

"Uh-huh. Or, it could be you knew him. Maybe knew him well enough to kill him?"

"I didn't kill him."

"Anybody who can vouch for your whereabouts between eight o'clock last night and, say, eleven o'clock this morning?"

"My horse. The stars."

The sheriff unbuttoned John Reid's long overcoat, exposing a blue cotton shirt and a leather cowboy vest much like the one he wore himself. A gun belt crossed diagonally over his chest, and the familiar Colt pistol hung close to his heart. The sheriff took the gun out of its holster and laid it, thudding heavily, on his desk.

"What's this?" Sheriff Kelly poked at the empty sheath fixed on the belt at his right underarm. "Where's your knife?"

"I lost it."

"Where?"

"Outside Phoenix... or maybe Denver... I forgot."

Dan Reid stepped forward alongside his uncle. "Sheriff, I'm telling you, there is no way in God's creation that he could—"

"Shut the hell up. Your uncle's under arrest."

Sheriff Kelly jingled the keys all the way over to the corner of the room which was enclosed by a narrow cage of iron bars. A bench with a cavalry blanket, and a brass spittoon doubling as a chamber pot, were the only accommodations.

John Reid entered without a fuss. Once the iron bars were slammed closed, and locked, the ranger turned his back to the bars to receive an unlocking of his handcuffs.

"You seem to know the routine pretty well, you ol' bastard," said the sheriff, standing by as the deputy took away the handcuffs.

John Reid bent over and coughed into his hands. "Sheriff, would you mind putting out your cigar?"

Sheriff Kelly blew smoke into his face instead.

Dan Reid said, "You better take good care of my uncle! If you so much as stir a hair on his head…."

"Yeah, yeah. Go on back to your goddamned newspaper and let me do my job."

"It's all right, Dan." The ranger almost managed a wry smile. "I'm fine."

##


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 3

Betsy Reid showed up at the jail scarcely an hour after the ranger was arrested. She carried a large pie basket with its contents covered by a red-and-white checkered towel. Smiling in a neighborly way, she approached the desk where Deputy Yarnell sat.

"Evenin', Josh," she said.

"Ma'am. What's that you've got there?"

"I figured your prisoner wouldn't be getting any supper tonight, what with Mrs. Wagner's kitchen in such a state as it is. So I brought along some extra from what I've made."

The deputy lifted the checkered towel and sniffed at the contents of the pie basket. "Mmm-mmm, fried chicken, green peas and butter, mashed potatoes…"

"And giblet gravy," she finished. "Good thing I brought two."

Betsy Reid removed one deep-dish plate full of food and set it on the desk, right in front of the deputy. She had a knife, fork and spoon wrapped in a napkin tucked in the pocket of her apron.

"Why, thank you, Ma'am."

"Don't mention it. There's plenty."

One helping of food remained at the bottom of the pie basket, beneath a wooden divider on pegs. Betsy lifted out the divider and then retrieved the second deep-dish white plate.

"Josh, would you mind unlocking the cell?"

"Sorry, Ma'am," said the deputy, his mouth full of a chicken drumstick. "I can't unlock the cell for nobody. Sheriff's got the key on him."

"How can I feed it to him?"

The deputy scooped a spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. While chewing, he got up from his desk and scooted a spare chair over next to the bars. "Put it on there, Ma'am, and let him reach through."

Betsy Reid set the plate down on the chair, and she took the other set of silverware from the pocket of her apron.

"Nothing but a spoon," said the deputy, as he settled back in his chair.

A tear came to her eye, and she turned away so the deputy wouldn't see. To look at that frail old man locked away in a dark cage, her heart bounced against her ribs. How could this be the same man? She could still see him on the saddle of that magnificent white stallion as the horse reared near vertical and he waved good-bye. A white hat. A black mask. And the Indian on a painted pony at his side. People called him a legend, until the days when legends became side-show entertainment at Buffalo Bill's Wild West carnival. Calamity Jane and Annie Oakley and the great Chief Sitting Bull himself had become caricatures of their own names.

"I'm sorry," she said.

The ranger squatted on his haunches before the bars, as he had done at campfires for most of his adult life. He reached the spoon through, got a scoop of green peas and mashed potatoes, and brought it back to his bearded face without dropping a morsel. "This is good," he said. "It's been a long time since I've had a home-cooked meal. Thank you, Elizabeth."

"How could they arrest you? When Danny telephoned from the paper and he told me…."

"I'm a stranger in town without an alibi. Sheriff's just doing his job. I don't blame them a bit." He picked up the drumstick by the bone and gnawed into like a gentleman, wiping his lower lip and beard in between each bite.

"Surely they know who you are?"

"I'm John Reid, the newspaper man's uncle."

"But—"

"Elizabeth," he said sternly. "I'm innocent until proven guilty. The law will see the truth on the merits of the evidence."

Betsy watched him eat, and all the things she had thought to say evaporated like the food off the white china plate. He ran the spoon smoothly around the circumference and cleaned off every last drop of gravy. The only thing left was the drumstick's bone.

She poured him some water from a ceramic pitcher into an enameled tin cup, the blue speckled kind of cup that he probably had in his saddle bags.

"I'll come back in the morning with coffee," she promised.

"You don't need to go to all this trouble."

"Sure I do. I'm thankful that I'm here to do it, which I wouldn't be if it weren't for you."

The ranger darted a concerned glance in the deputy's direction. His blue irises twinkled through the lenses of his spectacles, the first clear view she'd had of his eyes since he'd arrived in town. Those were the eyes she remembered as showing through the holes in the black mask, only now they seemed smaller and less vibrant.

"I know you were always uncomfortable hearing 'thank yous' from people like me." _People whose lives you've saved._ "But there it is. I am going to keep bringing you meals for as long as you're in there, and you can't run off, and you can't stop me. So, good-night…. Uncle John."

"Good-night, Elizabeth."

Betsy took the empty plate back to the sheriff's desk and packed it in the bottom of the pie basket. The deputy was grunting, "Mm-yum," as he scraped his spoon on the plate to get every last morsel.

Photographs were on the desk. Betsy looked down at them, and quickly grimaced in disgust.

"Oh, you shouldn't look at those." The deputy slurped his fingers, and hastily nudged them aside. He pushed too hard, and the photographs fluttered all over the floor. "Oh shit. Excuse me, Ma'am."

Betsy knelt to pick them up before he could even get out of his chair. "So, this is the murdered man?"

"Yep," said the deputy.

She looked at the grisly scene rendered so clearly in black-and-white Kodak film, and after a brief moment the revulsion passed. After all, she had experienced horror before. Details of the boarding-house room got cataloged by her quick mind: the salesman's shoes, coat and hat; his large suitcase; the brass bars of his bed's headboard. The body's stiff legs sprawled half off the left-hand side of the bed, as if he had lurched away from his attacker at the last minute. Blood splashed all over the wallpaper and the floor, more blood than Betsy ever imagined a single person could have inside them.

"Who took these photos?" she asked. "Bert Coulson?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

Betsy humphed her dislike of the photographer, who had once over-charged her for the printing of portrait postcards.

"Why didn't he take a shot from the other side of the bed, near the window?"

The deputy shrugged as he wiped his face clean. "Doesn't matter."

"Why not? Maybe you'd see something, like evidence."

"No, Ma'am. We already looked for footprints in the blood…. Are you sure you're feeling all right talking about this? Lookin' at these pictures?"

Betsy said softly, "If I can look into the face of my dead baby girl, I can look at these pictures, Deputy."

"Yes, Ma'am."

"So, why wouldn't there be footprints on the other side of the bed?"

"The angle of the knife slash on the throat. The murderer would have to stand facing the victim, on the side of the bed by the door."

"What if he wasn't facing the victim? When I kill a chicken for supper, I stand this way." Betsy took up a butter knife to illustrate. She stood with her left shoulder toward the desk, and slashed an imaginary line over the deputy's ink blotter.

"Even so, Ma'am, you'd be standing on _that_ side of the bed. If he was standing by the window, he'd have to slash the throat back-handed. Or, he'd have to grab Mr. Bledsoe by the hair and fight with him a lil'. There's no sign of a scuffle."

She nodded. "Guess so."

Betsy reached down with her other hand to clear the empty plate, and that's when the idea hit. "What if the murderer was left-handed?"

The ranger stood up and gripped the bars. "Try it, Deputy," he called out from across the room.

Sighing skeptically, the deputy took up the butter knife in his left hand and slashed downward at an imaginary victim on the desk. In mid-stroke, he froze and stared at the angle of the silvery blade.

"Son-of-a-bitch," the deputy said.

"If I were you," Betsy said. "I'd get over to that boarding house and talk to the sheriff before the Chinese boys clean up every trace of blood."

The deputy kept the butter knife as he dashed out the door.

Betsy turned to shine a broad smile at the old man. "You've still got it, Ranger."

"Don't call me that."

"Who's gonna hear us, now? The cockroaches?"

"It was your idea, not mine," he said as he ambled back to the bench and blanket in the corner of the cell. "If anyone's going to solve this puzzle, it won't be me."

"How can you say that? Who else but you could?"

"Go home to your family, Elizabeth," he interrupted.

She covered up the pie basket and hoisted it to her bent arms. "I'll be back in the morning. How do you like your eggs?"

"Cooked," he said, settling into the corner and pulling the hat down over his face.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 4

Betsy served supper with pride, trying a new recipe for roast chicken from this month's issue of _Good Housekeeping_ magazine.

"I sent a telegram to New York," Dan Reid said as he sat down to the table.

"I know what a telegram is!" piped his five-year-old son Britt.

"Of course you do, sweetie." Betsy spooned thick gravy over her son's heap of mashed potatoes.

The boy was only five, but he was clever for his age and dressed the part. Betsy had put him in a white shirt with a starched collar, and he sat up straight at the table. Britt Reid had the same, lean build as his father, the long neck and narrow face that promised he'd been tall someday. Betsy took a moment to admire her little gentleman, before she looked back to the grown man who held her heart.

"Who did you send a telegram to, Dan?"

"The sewing machine company. I'm going to find out everything there is to know about this J.T. Bledsoe and maybe why someone would want to murder him."

"Isn't that the sheriff's job?" she asked.

"Robert Kelly is a bounty hunter with a badge," Dan said. "He's in way over his head on this one. Maybe I am, too, but damnit I'm going to try to solve this thing!"

Britt giggled into his buttered peas at hearing his father curse. Betsy cast a scolding look aside to her son.

"Sorry for that," Dan mumbled.

"I just don't understand why the Ra-… I mean, your Uncle John doesn't tell the sheriff who he really is. They'd let him out of that jail in a second."

"That's exactly why, Betsy. He loves the law. He's spent his entire life upholding justice. The evidence will have to clear his name, or he won't be dragged out of that cell by a team of wild horses."

Betsy cut the meat off her drumstick with a knife and used her thick-handled silver fork to bring dainty morsels to her mouth.

"I like horses," Britt said. "When are you gonna teach me to ride a horse, Pa?"

Dan Reid didn't answer but traded a knowing gaze with Betsy. They had already bought their son a bicycle; it was wrapped up in brown paper and stored in the attic, waiting for Santa Claus to bring it down on Christmas morning.

"I went down to visit the jail this evening," Betsy said. "I brought Uncle John some dinner."

"That's nice of you, honey. Thanks."

Dan concentrated on his mashed potatoes. He lowered his head so that all she saw of him was the candlelight glowing in the corn stalks of blond hair shooting up off his scalp. So, he used to ride with the Lone Ranger. Betsy imagined her husband as a much younger man, galloping alongside Silver, swinging his guns, and throwing punches into the dirty faces of outlaws. So, he hadn't always been a quiet newspaper man on a bicycle. Some very un-Christian thoughts rushed to her mind, catching her by surprise. Betsy's hand slipped and her knife clattered on the edge of her plate.

Dan looked up. "You all right, honey?"

"It still bothers me. Why didn't you tell me that you rode with the Lone Ranger!"

Little Britt asked, "Was there really a Lone Ranger, Pa?"

"Sure was. I've got a silver bullet to prove it."

"You do?"

Betsy echoed her son, "You do?"

Dan nodded to both of them. "I never showed it because it was a secret, but now I guess it doesn't matter anymore."

"Wow, my Pa knows the real Lone Ranger! And Tonto too?"

"Yeah, Tonto too."

"Did you help him chase down the Butch Cabbage gang?"

"Cavendish," Betsy corrected.

Dan Reid shook his head. "I was about your age when Butch Cavendish met justice. I rode with the Ranger later on, in the late-seventies."

"What does _kemo-sabe _really mean?" Britt asked.

Betsy answered, "It's an Indian word for 'trusted friend.'"

"No, it's not," said Dan.

Betsy leaned forward over the table and blinked against the brightness of the candles. "It isn't?"

"I used to ask, too. They'd just smile and say it meant that they trusted each other."

"Don't you know?"

"Funny thing," said Dan. "I've asked around, and it's not a word in any of the major Indian languages. Apache, Sioux, Navajo, and even the Ojibway and the Mohawk up near Canada."

"Which tribe was Tonto from?" Betsy asked.

"He never told me. You know, he didn't talk about himself much. I can't be sure 'Tonto' was even his real name. I've speculated that maybe _kemo-sabe_ is from the Spanish phrase, _quien sabe,_ or, 'who knows?' Maybe it was a kind of private joke between them."

"Why Spanish?"

"Tonto spoke Spanish, too, " he told her. "Better than he spoke English, I'll tell you that."

"That can't be right," Betsy said.

"Why not?" Dan Reid suddenly smiled, something he hadn't done all day. "Oh, you're thinking it doesn't fit with what's written in those penny-dreadful paperbacks. 'With his faithful Indian companion,' and 'a hearty heigh-ho Silver.' Their horses galloped for days without rest or food. Their guns never ran out of bullets. He went up and down a thousand miles of Santa Fe Trail like I go up and down this street. Don't tell me you've read any of those, Betsy."

"A few," she admitted quietly. "Though they could have used a little romance."

Dan chuckled while poking at his potatoes. "Romance? I cringe to imagine an Emily Bronte type getting hold of it. Oh Heathcliff! No, no, a woman would ruin the story from start to finish. Probably make the ranger and Tonto into buffoons and ridiculous caricatures of themselves."

Betsy sipped at her warm apple cider, savoring the hint of cinnamon stick. Her favorite quote from _Wuthering Heights_ sprang to mind, I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it. Indignation burned her cheeks; who was Dan to say that a woman could not write an adventure story just as well as a man?

"Tell me a Lone Ranger story, Pa!" Britt practically shouted.

"I will, son, right after supper."


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 5

Betsy was sitting at her dressing table before bed, brushing her long auburn hair one hundred times. Someone knocked on the front door downstairs.

"I'll go see who it is." Dan slipped on a flannel robe over his nightshirt.

Betsy followed him and paused at the top of the staircase to view the foyer. Who could it be at this time of night? Had there been another murder?

Dan opened the door. Two men came in: Sheriff Kelly who didn't take off his hat when entering someone's home, and old John Reid who politely did.

"Uncle John!" Dan Reid threw his arms around the ranger's shoulders and hugged him tight.

Watching from above, Betsy slapped a hand to the frilly front of her own nightgown. She held herself back from rushing downstairs to join in the happy reunion.

The ranger clapped his hands on his nephew's back to coax him out of the embrace. "Calm down, Dan. I'm fine."

"How…?"

Sheriff Kelly explained, "Deputy ran over to the boarding house while I was helping Doc Kitzinger wrap up the body into a pine box. He said, 'What if the killer was left-handed?' We checked the other side of the bed. Shit, there it was. Under a throw rug, clear as a rubber stamp, we found a footprint in the blood. Had to be the murderer's, 'cause by the time Mrs. Wagner discovered the body the next day, the blood was all but dry. Damn near would've missed it. The China boys would've cleaned up the room in another half an hour."

John Reid pointed down to his own cowboy boots. "Like Cinderella's sisters, my feet didn't fit the shoe. Didn't I tell you, Dan? The law recognizes an innocent man."

"I'm just glad you're home. Thank you, Sheriff."

Sheriff Kelly touched the brim of his hat, then ducked out the door. A whoosh of cool breeze, and he was gone.

"Guess I'll be on my way, too."

"No." Dan caught the old man's sleeve. "Wait. You can't just leave in the middle of the night."

"I don't want to disturb your family, Dan."

Betsy called down from the top of the stairs, "You _are_ family. You're staying with us, and I don't want to hear another word about it."

##

Dan and Betsy blew out the kerosene flame lamps on either side of the brass bed. They snuggled in under the blankets together, close, but not quite touching. Faint blue moonlight shined through the window panes.

In the silence, she whispered as if talking in her sleep, "I never told you the story of how the ranger saved my life."

"He saved your life?" Dan gasped. "When?"

"It happened when I was small, about eleven years old, in the summer after that terrible Christmas when my mamma died of the consumption. Daddy got a position teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. We was living in Oklahoma at the time, so just him and me took a train out of Tulsa... but we never made it. Outlaws shot the conductor and the engineer both. They went up and down the aisles, collecting jewelry and wallets into sacks. When they came to us, my daddy gave up his wallet and his pocket watch. He begged, 'Just don't hurt us.' But then, the outlaws noticed…. Around his neck he wore a gold chain with my mother's wedding ring on it. Someday, it would've been mine. The outlaws asked for the ring, too. Daddy said, no."

She paused to swallow the lump developing in her throat. In the darkness, reality had faded away, and she saw clearly once more the cruel hazel eyes that had showed above the fold of the outlaw's red bandana. She heard, in her mind's ear once more, the Texas twang of the man's hate-filled voice. _I said, gimme that there ring_.

"And he shot my daddy in the chest, point blank, right there in the seat next to me. The bang of the forty-five hurt my ears. I felt my daddy jump as the bullets slammed into him... one, two. And that outlaw yanked the chain and took my mother's ring. He laughed at my daddy bleeding all over me, and he laughed at me screaming."

A silence passed. Dan Reid touched her shoulder, a faint pressure she hardly felt through the layers of blankets. "Oh sweetheart."

"There's more. When that outlaw started laughing at me, I just went a little crazy. Eleven years old and a skinny red-headed girl, but I never felt hate like that. I wanted to kill him. I picked up my daddy's walking cane and I swung it at that outlaw's face. I hit him and opened a fat gash across his eyebrow. I'd expect he'll have a scar to this day. The cane's head also snagged on his bandana and pulled it off his face. Everyone on that train car saw that dirty coward's face."

Betsy licked her dry lips. Like a photograph, his face resurfaced in her memory. As always, she remembered him only in profile, his jagged hair disheveled, and blood gushing down his cheek.

"He started shooting wildly at the people who were just looking at him. Just looking. He emptied his gun into the folks behind me, and clicked the trigger a few more times. He realized he didn't have time to reload, so he just ran. Together with his gang, they jumped the train and galloped off."

"I hate to ask, but when did the Ranger show up?"

"The train was still going full steam and coming up to a switch on the tracks. It was winter and the switch was frozen over. If there was a conductor, we would've stopped and thawed it out, but as it was... we were heading straight for a crash. Everyone was screaming, but there was no way to the engine except to climb over the coal car. Some men tried, and fell off. Some people jumped the train and fell hard to the ground. I just sat with my daddy. I wanted to crash. I wanted to go to Heaven and be with my daddy and my mamma, so I wouldn't have to feel like this any more."

"Oh, Betsy."

She closed her eyes and the tears poured freely out, soaking her pillow on either side of her cheeks.

"The Lone Ranger galloped up to that train on that big white horse of his. Through all that snow and ice, he galloped full blast and caught up to us. He jumped onto the engine car. He pulled the break and we skidded to a stop just short of the switch track."

"Whew," Dan gasped.

"Tonto doctored those that were shot. Those that were still alive, that is. The Lone Ranger loaded up his horse Silver all cozy and warm in a cattle car. He thawed out the switch with a campfire, and then he drove that train into the next station. He made sure we were all taken care of. Then, with descriptions from the other survivors, he went out to hunt down them outlaws. One-by-one, from town-to-town, from Missouri to Utah, no matter how long it took. I grew up with my cousins in Dayton, and the years went by. Every so often, I'd see news in the national papers that another one of the Tulsa train gang had come up before a judge and had been sent on to their eternal punishment."

"You were eleven years old? That must have been after I'd left him, when I was working at the newspaper in Kansas City. He was starting to get on in years, but doesn't sound like he was slowing down any."

"He was like an angel." Betsy sighed to recall her last look at the ranger dressed in a blue shirt and denim jeans mounted on a white horse, and blending into the background colors of the winter sky.

"Betsy, after all these years, did he recognize you? Does he know who you are?"

"Of course he knows, Danny. I visited him in the jail, and he knows me. I'm just ashamed I didn't know him when he first showed up on my porch this morning."

"Don't be ashamed of that. I hardly recognized him myself."

"The real question is, has he forgotten his promise to me?"

"What promise?"

"Danny, there's one more. He tracked down all but one, out of the gang. The one who shot my daddy."

"It's been eighteen years."

"Eighteen years tomorrow exactly," she said in a whisper.

"A man like that is most likely dead, by now. That type always comes to an early end. If it's not a shoot-out over a card game, it's getting caught and hanged for something else."

"Sometimes, I'm still afraid he's going to find me."

"Don't be. Oh, Betsy, don't ever be afraid while I'm around."


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 6

In the morning, Betsy stood at her cast-iron stove making scrambled eggs and bacon and hash. She kept smiling even when bacon grease spattered on the sleeve of her new dress that she had just made from a pattern in McCall's magazine. A song played through her mind, _Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the ba-a-and pla-a-ayed o-o-on. He'd glide cross the floor with the girl he adored, and the ba-a-and pla-a-ayed o-o-on._

Britt skipped into the kitchen. On his face he wore the old man's black-rimmed round spectacles. The boy had to hold the large frames with both hands while he hopped around in circles, looking for rainbows in the sunlight beaming through the window glass.

"Where did you get those!" Betsy scolded. "Daniel Britt Reid, you give those spectacles to me, this instant! They'll ruin your eyes."

The boy handed them over. "Why ruin my eyes?"

"Because they're meant to help people see better when their eyes don't work in the first place. Your eyes work just fine, already, so looking through glasses will ruin your eyes. All right?"

"Yes, Ma."

"Couldn't you tell that things looked funny through here?"

"No, Ma."

"Didn't everything look all fuzzy?"

"No, Ma."

Betsy cocked her head, curious. She had played with her father's reading spectacles herself as a child.

"Are you saying everything looked the same, with the glasses on or off?"

Britt nodded. "Can I have my eggs, now?"

"May I," she said, absently.

"May I have my eggs, now, please?"

Betsy unfolded the frames and put the spectacles on.

##

She caught the ranger as he was descending halfway down the stairs. Old John Reid smiled good morning, and then asked, "Have you seen my-?"

Betsy handed up the spectacles. "They're just plain glass. Why are you wearing them? To hide your face?"

"Force of habit." He put the frames on his nose, and only then did he fully look up. "Breakfast smells good."

Betsy planted both fists on her hips, blocking his way at the bottom of the stairs. "Why don't you wear your mask anymore?"

"You know why."

"No, I don't."

"Ask Dan."

"I know about what happened to poor Tonto," Betsy said. "What I don't understand is, what gives you the right to spend ten years moping and feeling sorry for yourself,? You think you're the only one who ever had someone you loved get killed?"

"No, of course not," he sighed.

"There comes a time when you have to bury your dead, turn away and go on living without them."

"I did that once," he said, very quiet and very grim. "I buried my brother and all the Texas Rangers and made a fake grave for myself too. Well, you know that story. I couldn't do it the second time. I just can't be the Lone Ranger without Tonto."

"Then, who will be?"

"I'm an antique from a bygone era. In a few days, it'll be the Twentieth Century and I'll fade away as another relic of the past."

"People depend on you," she said in a tremulous voice. "Like my little Britt depends on me. When his baby sister died last year, don't you think I wanted to be buried with her? How could I be someone's mother when my little girl was gone? I kept going because of my son. He needs me, and I need you, Ranger."

He just shook his head.

"You promised me you'd track them all down. There's one more, out there somewhere. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I'm fresh out of silver bullets."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 7

Dan Reid bicycled home at noon, through a steady wind that chilled him through his coat down to the undershirt. Hearing the nickering snorts of a horse in the back yard, he rolled around the outside of the picket fence. Behind his house was a wild field of California weeds that in the summertime would turn to what he thought of as golden straw, but what his wife called ugly dead grass. But in this week before Christmas, steady rains and mild temperatures had turned the wild grass to a lush shade of green.

"Uncle John? Britt?"

At the far end of the field, the ranger walked alongside his dappled gray horse, leading it by the bridle. The little boy sat on the horse's back, his tiny legs flip-flopping.

Dan dismounted his bicycle and entered the picket fence. "Uncle John?"

The ranger led the horse nearer to him and stopped. Britt bobbed up and down, shouting, "Look, Pa, I'm riding a horse! I'm riding a horse!"

"I see that, son. You're looking fine."

"It's a delightful boy you've got here, Dan. Of course, I'd expect nothing less."

Dan smiled at the compliment, then grew serious again. "I've heard back from the telegram I sent to New York. Could you come inside? I'd like to talk about it."

"Talk to me now." John Reid continued leading the horse around a wide circle. The mare was plodding patiently, accepting the bounces and weak kicks of the enthusiastic rider.

Dan unfolded the square of paper as he walked the field next to his uncle. "All right. J.T. Bledsoe was around my age, forty-six years old. Born in West Tennessee, you were right about that. Widowed, no children. He worked for the Singer sewing machine company for four years. Prior to that, he worked as a telegraph operator, a cash register repairman, a typewriter repairman, and a number of handyman jobs going back more than twenty years."

"The motive sure wasn't money," the ranger said.

"Yeah. Listen to this. Back in Seventy-nine, he worked for the Wells Fargo company as a courier. He survived a train robbery outside of Tulsa."

"What did you say?"

Dan Reid hopped up his pace to get a little in front of him. "That's the train you rescued, I'll stake my newspaper on it."

"She told you about that?" he asked softly.

"Yeah, she did. Last night. She said one of the gang that ki-…" He glanced up to his happy little boy on the horse's back. Dan couldn't bring himself to say, _killed her father_ in front of his son. "One of them is still at large. Is that right?"

"That's right. I tracked him into Colorado and as far as eastern Nevada before I lost him, again. He's a slippery one, Dan. Smartest of the bunch, and gets smarter every year. He doesn't hang out in the usual places you'd expect to find a train robber. No, you won't find him in the saloons, the pool halls and among the scarlet women in houses of ill-repute."

Dan marveled at the old man, never imagining that the Lone Ranger even knew about those sorts of places, much less entered into them to search for a wanted man.

"After that day, he quit the gang and never robbed another train. He used his money to set himself up as a gentleman. Imagines himself an artist, of sorts, and a connoisseur of fine, sparkling things. I'd find him working as a jeweler or a watch maker or a seller of English crystal. Plus, his legitimate businesses served the double purpose of pawning the stolen articles his former gang provided. They always came back to him for cash. So, once I'd caught the rest of the gang, I lost my only way to track him."

"Wanna hear my hunch?" Dan asked.

"That he's here in town," the ranger said.

"Uh-huh."

"That he's masquerading as one of your upstanding citizens."

"Yep."

"That J.T. Bledsoe recognized him, and that's why he was murdered."

Dan Reid grinned. "Eureka."

The ranger stopped leading the horse. Stopped so suddenly that the gelding snorted and tossed its head at the unexpected tug on its bridle. "If he finds out who Betsy is…."

Dan shot a look to the house. "Oh god, I didn't think."

The former Lone Ranger laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "Dan, you've got to go to the sheriff with this."

"He won't listen to me. He despises me and my newspaper."

"You've got to give him the chance. He is the law, Dan."

"Once, there was a time when _you_ were the only law I knew. Uncle John, will you help me?"

The ranger took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "I can't. I'm too old."

"Damnit! This is my wife we're talking about."

Betsy rang a bell out the back porch. "Dinner's ready! Come and get it!"


	10. Chapter 10

Over ham sandwiches, potato salad and dill pickles, Dan Reid repeated the conversation from the back yard. Betsy's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened, and he could almost see the cogs and gears of her mind working beneath those luxurious wavy tresses of auburn hair.

"We've got no jewelers or glass shops in town," she said quickly. "People go into San Diego for that, or they order things shipped down from San Francisco. We've got a watch maker, but he's some feeble old man, eighty-five if he's a day. Can't be him. Who else we got? Dan, help me think."

"The only barber in town is a Negro," Dan said. "The druggist is as fat as Grover Cleveland. The piano player in the saloon, maybe?"

"The school marm!" Britt piped up.

His mother gently reminded her son, "She's a woman."

"Who would be able to come and go from Mrs. Wagner's boarding house without being suspicious?" asked the ranger. "We know the murderer re-visited the scene the next day."

"We do?" Betsy asked.

"The throw rug!" Dan Reid exclaimed and snapped his fingers. "The sheriff said that the footprint they found underneath was as clear as a rubber stamp. That means, the blood had dried by the time someone tossed a throw rug on top of it."

Old John Reid nodded.

Betsy said, "And, we know he's left-handed. Remember, I saw the photographs?"

"He'll have big feet," Dan Reid said. "The prints were of fancy loafer shoes—either Oxfords or Derbys—in a size fourteen wide."

"Where does a man go to buy shoes around here?" the ranger asked.

Dan Reid shook his head. "The sheriff already asked every cobbler in town."

"So," Betsy thought aloud. "He might order his shoes and clothes from the Sears-Roebuck catalog, like I do mine. If he's that wily, how can we ever find him before he gets spooked and skips town?"

Dan Reid looked darkly to his uncle. "I remember one way to smoke outlaws out of their holes. Bait him. Set a trap. Say, I can use the newspaper."

"No," said the ranger.

"I'll write up what I know about J.T. Bledsoe, about him being the survivor of the '79 train robbery."

"No," said the former Ranger again.

"I'll let it slip in there that Betsy Reid is also a survivor of that robbery, and she will be cooperating with the sheriff in giving a detailed description of the man who shot her father."

Betsy put a hand to her throat, breathing heavily now as if she'd been running. "Oh, Dan. He could be right here in town. He could be someone I see every day."

Old John Reid pointed sternly across the table. "Don't print that story, Dan. You'll be tying your wife to a fence post and calling out a rabid wolf to come and eat her."

"But we've got you!"

"No, you don't!" The ranger burst out of his chair, and it toppled over to the floor with a loud clatter.

Britt rushed off his chair into his mother's skirts. "Mommy, why is Uncle John shouting at Pa?"

"Shh, it's all right," she said and kissed his forehead. Blinking back tears, she looked up at the ranger. "Help me."

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I just can't."

Dan Reid dashed out of the kitchen. He tore down the hall and into the parlor. He frantically pulled a key from his vest pocket, unlocked the little music box on the mantle, and snatched up the small item inside.

Hurrying back to the kitchen, with the lump of metal warming in his hand, he found the ranger walking toward the back door. Dan jumped to block his uncle from leaving.

He didn't say a word. He just held out his hand and opened his fingers. The silver bullet twinkled in the dappled sunshine that played on the window glass.

"You told me yesterday that you were fresh out of silver bullets. Well, here. Take this one. You need it a hell of a lot more than I do."


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 8

As John Reid stood there holding that silver-plated bullet between his fingertips, a remarkable transformation took place. Strength poured back into his muscles; it was visible in the way he straightened his posture, squared his shoulders and lifted his neck. He grew two inches taller just by shrugging off his world-weary slouch.

With his other hand, he removed his heavy black spectacles. His thumb folded the stems over the round lenses, and he slid them into his jacket's breast pocket. Now, only his tightly cropped salt-and-pepper beard concealed the face he had not exposed to the public in years. Those crystal blue eyes shined brightly, reflecting the silver off the .45 caliber bullet.

"Two things are wrong with your plan," said the former Lone Ranger. "One is, you never, _ever_ put a lady in danger. This so-and-so must never know that Elizabeth was the little girl who clubbed him with her father's cane. I'll bait the trap. I'll let it slip in conversation around town that I was on that train in '79 when it was robbed. In a way, it's true."

Betsy clapped a hand over her mouth to smother her shuddering sigh of a laugh.

Little Britt tugged at his mother's apron, jiggling the chain of the pocket watch she wore clipped to her waist. "Ma? Can I have more pickles?"

"What? Oh. Of course, honey."

"Second," continued John Reid. "You never use your newspaper for anything but reporting the God's honest truth. Dan, I'm surprised at you and a little disappointed for even suggesting such a thing. What kind of example are you setting for your son? To print whatever you feel like writing, just to serve your own purposes?"

"Well, if you put it that way—"

"There is no other way to put it, Dan." He reached inside under his coat and took the Colt .45 out of its shoulder holster. "A lot of people seem to think that _this_ is power in the West. It's not. The real power is in the ideas found in the printed word. You can get people to think and change their opinions. You must print the truth. Always."

"Yes, sir."

The ranger broke open the cylinder on his pistol, rotated it and checked that it was fully loaded. With a clap and a click, he closed the pistol and placed it back in the holster inside his jacket. The silver bullet he slipped into a tiny penny pocket on his leather vest.

"Now, where does a man go to get a haircut around here?"

Dan Reid grinned brightly. "There's only one barber shop in town. I'll take you there right now."

##

John Reid settled comfortably onto the high leather chair. He held still for the barber to unfurl a white sheet in front of him and pin the corners at the back.

Folks called him Old Black Joe, even though his name wasn't Joseph and he wasn't old. He wasn't very dark-complexioned either, being the son of a New Orleans mulatto and a white riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. Cowboys who spent days in the open sun were tanned darker than he was, but that didn't matter. Everyone knew him as the only Negro man for miles around.

"So, what can I do for you today?" the barber asked in a booming, cheerful voice. He scratched a straight razor up and down a thick leather strap attached to the back of the chair.

"Just a little trim at the back," said John Reid. "It bothers me when those curls start coming over my collar."

Old Black Joe laughed heartily, apparently finding that to be quite funny a remark. "Can I shave that beard for you, too?"

"No, thank you."

"Are you sure about that? If I trim it down to a mustache, you'll look as handsome as Teddy Roosevelt."

Dan Reid settled into a waiting chair, to pretend to read his own newspaper, to watch his uncle at work. He'd almost forgotten how effortlessly the Lone Ranger could slip into a disguise and put on fake accents with the skill of a Vaudevillian performer. The toothless gold miner. The Southern gentleman. The ex-cowboy saddle tramp. Dan knew that the beard was real, but couldn't shake the weird feeling that it was just glued on with spirit gum. Any moment now, he'd peel it off and put the mask on.

"No, I'm sure. I don't think I'll ever look like Teddy Roosevelt, beard or not."

Old Black Joe chuckled at that, too, and got to work with his scissors and combs at the back of John Reid's head.

The former Lone Ranger asked, "Say, do you know anything about this murdered man, this J.T. Bledsoe?"

"Why d'you ask?"

"Well, I figure if I've been arrested and accused of murdering a man, I'm curious to know more about him. As the town's barber, I figured you've heard all the gossip."

"I sure don't know much," said Old Black Joe. "He was only in town a week."

"Did he come in for a haircut?"

"Sure did. That very day. He acted all skittish and nervous, like he thought I was going to cut him by accident. I gave him a shave and a haircut, combed in some tonic oil, and sent him on his way. He tipped me two bits, I remember."

"Generous," John Reid remarked.

"Yeah. Seemed a nice fella. What a shame." The barber finished trimming the back of his customer's neck and turned to the mirror to put away his scissors and comb.

"Did he tell you why he was feeling nervous that day?" John Reid asked.

"Now that you ask, he did say something strange. 'I have done saw the Devil himself,' he said."

"Those were his exact words?"

"Yep. A Tennessee man, he was. 'Done saw' this, and 'done saw' that."

"He said, 'the Devil himself?' Did he explain what he meant?"

"No sir," the barber answered. He came back with a glass jar of hair tonic, and dipped his comb in it before raking through John Reid's rug of inky black curls.

"You asked?"

"Sure I did. I can't pass up a lead into a story like that, but Mr. Bledsoe wouldn't say anymore about it. All he would tell me, he was going to leave town first thing in the morning. Poor soul, he never got the chance."

The three men in the barber shop were quiet for a moment.

Dan Reid asked, from behind his newspaper, "Was anyone else in the shop at the time?"

"No, Mr. Reid. He was the last haircut of the day."

"Who was just before him?" John Reid asked from the chair.

"Doc Kitzinger."

The old Ranger, and his eyes darted back and forth rapidly while he thought of what to say next. "I don't even know the man, but I can't help feeling a sympathy for him. I certainly know how it is to see the Devil himself. Twenty years ago, I was witness to a train robbery. On the way from Tulsa heading to Baltimore, a gang of outlaws wearing bandanas over their faces stormed onto the train. They shot the conductor and robbed the passengers. Shot some little girl's daddy, right there in the seat next to her."

"Lord have mercy," said Old Black Joe.

"They went on to shoot half a dozen passengers before their pistols went dry. They hopped the train, and left it to run at full speed out of control. All those folks would've been dead in a crash if the Lone Ranger hadn't…."

"The Lone Ranger!"

"He galloped up to the train and jumped from the saddle onto the engine so he could pull the brake."

Old Black Joe came around from behind the chair to face him. "You saw the Lone Ranger?"

John Reid nodded soberly. "Yes, I did."

"God bless you, Mister."

The barber took off the white sheet, and lent a hand to the older man's elbow to help him get up from the chair.

"How much do I owe you?" John Reid asked.

"It's on the house."

"No, I didn't tell you that story in order to get a free haircut. Fifty cents, isn't it?"

Old Black Joe backed away from the coins, waving his hands as if shooing a fly. "Next time. This one's all on me."

The old Ranger put the handful of coins back into his trousers' pocket. "Thank you, uh, what's your name?"

"Folks around here call me—"

"I know, but what's your name?"

Surprised, it took him a moment to answer. "Bernard, sir. Bernard Jones."

"Well, thank you, Bernard." John Reid put his hat back on and touched the brim in a gentlemanly kind of way. "Good day."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 9

Several days passed. Every night, Dan Reid slept with a pistol under his pillow. Despite what his uncle had said about the power of printed word, the reality was that no rolled up newspaper would stop a murderer who climbed in the window. Betsy lay still beside him, pretending to be asleep, but the fact was neither of them managed so much as two hours a night.

On Sunday morning, Christmas Eve, Betsy got into her best Sears catalog dress, a satin gown with high puffed shoulders of leg-of-mutton sleeves that was such a dark shade of blue it looked black except in direct sunlight. She wore her long gray overcoat and pancake straw hat. Dan thought she'd never looked so beautiful, like a Gibson Girl who'd walked right off a magazine cover.

"Where is he?" she wondered aloud. "We're going to be late."

Dan Reid left her by the front door, with Britt firmly in hand, and he went exploring to discover where his uncle had gone.

"Aren't you coming, Uncle John?" he asked.

John Reid sat in the kitchen, nursing a cup of freshly brewed coffee and reading the newspaper. "Nope," he said.

Betsy must have had the ears of a hungry timber wolf, for those high-buttoned shoes of her came clicking all the way down the corridor that traversed from one side of the house to the other. She struck a pose at the kitchen doorway, one fist on her hip and the other fist holding her umbrella as if she meant to beat him over the head with it.

"Why aren't you coming to Christmas Eve services with us?"

"I haven't attended a real church in thirty-five years," said the ranger. "Out on the prairie they're a little few and far between. I figure me and the Lord have an understanding."

"Well, I'd say it's high time you revisit the Lord's house now that you have a chance."

"Betsy…." Dan began, but his mind went blank. She'd been fairly upset at his uncle brewing a pot of coffee, which to her was doing work on the Sabbath, but she'd let that go after a brief debate. Dan braced himself, expecting the worst for this offense.

"I don't want to hear any more arguments," she said. "Or, next thing I'll be hearing excuses from Britt about how he doesn't want to attend services either. How dare you come into my home and share meals with us and not show reverence for the Lord's Day and Christmas Eve, no less."

The ranger put down his coffee cup and folded the newspaper. "You're right. I'm sorry that I'm setting a bad example. Though I don't have a Sunday suit with me, I figure the Lord won't mind."

##

The minister gave a rousing sermon on the subject of John the Baptist and how he was murdered by King Herod and his head was served on a platter by the lustful scarlet woman Salome. It was a fairly grim sermon for the Sunday before Christmas, but these were grim days. The sheriff had not caught the murderer of J.T. Bledsoe. Everyone looked suspiciously left and right during the sermon, searching for guilt in their neighbors' faces.

_What's become of this town? _Betsy thought. If one of their own citizens could masquerade as an honest man, who could ever be trusted?

She held onto her little boy's hand, so warm and tiny and vulnerable. For the first time, she imagined how her father must have felt sitting in that train seat when the outlaw leaned over and asked for the ring. He would've wanted to protect his little daughter at the risk of his own life. In those agonizing minutes, as the life drained out of him, he might have found peace of mind in the knowledge that they'd shot him instead of her. A parent could endure anything bravely but the death of their own child.

Betsy dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief.

"Ma, why are you crying?" Britt whispered.

"The sermon," she said. "Hush, now, and listen."

Somehow, she made it through the prayers, the Our Father, the hymns and the Hallelujahs. Swallowing her tears, Betsy Reid straightened her dignity and filed out of the double doors with everyone else.

"Ma, I think I drank too much lemonade." Britt bent his knees awkwardly and grabbed the front of his pants.

Betsy called to her husband, "Dan, I'm taking him to the outhouse."

Dan Reid nodded sideways to acknowledge that he'd heard. He continued shaking hands with the minister and congratulating him on such a moving sermon. The ranger stood by his side, silent and watchful of the congregation filing out the doors.

Betsy walked her son around the back of the white-washed church building. They followed a long brick path, past a picket fence to a little boxy shack with a half moon cut in the door.

She unlatched it for him, as the hook-and-eye were a bit rusty and needed a housewife's strong thumb. "There you are, Britt. Do you need help with your buttons?"

"No, Ma. I'm a big boy, now!"

She smiled. "Of course you are."

Betsy closed the door and waited outside. She made a study of the gathering rain clouds and decided to open her umbrella.

"Mrs. Reid?"

She tilted the umbrella back, just a little, to see the man who approached. The town's photographer was a tall and lanky Southern gentleman, in a finely tailored black wool suit, a London bowler hat, and a silver pin for a tie clasp.

"Mr. Coulson," she answered politely. "I'm afraid the facilities are occupied at the moment."

"I can wait, thank you," he said.

They stood in utter silence for a full minute ticking by on the gold watch dangling from her necklace chain. Betsy shifted the weight on her feet, as her Sunday best high-button shoes were her least comfortable.

Mr. Coulson said, "I must say that your husband's uncle is quite a character. He has hardly been in town for a week, and such events have befallen him. Is it true, the rumor that I'm hearing around town? They're saying he once met the Lone Ranger?"

"Why yes, that's so," Betsy said, distracted, waiting for her son.

"A train robbery, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. Why, here's an idea. Your husband should print up the whole story in the _Daily Sentinel_. Folks love to read exciting tales like that, especially if they're based on true events."

"I suppose they do."

"Unless Mr. Reid's uncle can't remember all the details. Not much of a story can be made from an old man's fading memories."

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with his memory. He's as sharp as a tack."

"Indeed?" remarked Mr. Coulson, apparently pleased to hear it. "No doubt he clearly remembers each one of the outlaws? Their faces?"

Britt emerged from the outhouse, with his knickerbockers still unbuttoned at the fly and a little stain of wetness down the thigh. His lip quivered as he was about to cry. "Ma, I'm sorry. I tried to be careful."

"It's all right, Britt. I'll wash them up tomorrow."

While looking down to her son, Betsy noticed from the corner of her eye that the photographer had very large feet. Size twelve or fourteen, she'd guess. Chester the town's shoemaker could never make shoes as dapper as those; his Sunday best, no doubt ordered through the Sears-Roebuck catalog.

"Excuse me, may I?" Mr. Coulson gestured toward the door of the outhouse with his left hand.

_He's left-handed._

Betsy rotated in place and blocked the door, facing him off. The photographer had an old, jagged scar on his eyebrow that disturbed the line of pencil-perfect hairs. _That's where I hit him with my father's cane_. His eyes – why hadn't she recognized them before? As greenish-hazel as the muddy waters of a Tennessee fishing pond, narrow and close-set, his eyes maintained a hard cruelty that his faked smile could not disguise.

"You."

"Mrs. Reid, is something wrong?"

A shaking began in the very center of her gut, and it spread out to her legs and arms with a lightning rush.

"Give me back my mother's wedding ring." Her voice trembled along with the rest of her.

"I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

Betsy yanked shut her umbrella. Like a club, she swung it aiming for his head. The photographer jumped back. She missed. The folded umbrella swooped through the air. She swung again, back-handed, and missed a second time.

Roaring with animal rage, she charged at him, swinging her umbrella back and forth. Mr. Coulson hopped backwards every time, effortlessly escaping her feeble attempts to kill him with a thin cone of wire and black satin.

"You crazy bitch!" His gentlemanly demeanor vanished. "What ter hell is a matter with you?"

"Murderer!" she screamed.

Britt Reid blasted off at a run, as fast as his little flapping feet could carry him.

Finally, she landed one. The umbrella clapped onto the photographer's shoulder. Instead of being hurt, he grabbed it and used it to pull her into his clutches. He yanked the umbrella out of her furious hands, stinging her fingers in the process.

His left hand seized her by the neck. He shoved her back against the white-washed boards of the outhouse. The large cloisonné brooch dug sharply into her throat.

"The cane girl," he said softly through a sadistic sneer.

Betsy kicked his shins and pounded her fists on his arms. It had to hurt him, but he didn't seem to care.

He leaned his weight harder into his hand. The pressure of the brooch shut off her breathing. Betsy clawed at his sleeves, but she was wearing her Sunday best white gloves and couldn't get her fingernails on him. Purple and silver sparkles filled her vision.

His voice came to her throbbing ears like a demon in a nightmare. "Do you know, for years I have fantasized about finding you? About killing you in, oh, so many ways? What a shame we don't have time for me to make you suffer. You deserve to pay a higher price for the misery you caused me. It's your fault, you know. You made me shoot all those poor, innocent people."

Betsy gagged on her own tongue as she tried to curse at him. That's when everything went black.


	13. Chapter 13

Dan Reid ran around the church building, empty-handed and wishing to God he had a gun. Who would think to wear a pistol to Christmas Eve services? He saw them, as he tore down the long brick path: that lanky gentleman in a wool suit holding Betsy pinned against the wall with one hand. She sagged in his left-handed grasp, her face as gray as death.

"You bastard!" His hands balled into fists.

The photographer slipped away like a shadow around the back corner of the church building.

Betsy dropped to the grass.

Dan shot on past where her body collapsed, in fierce pursuit of the man. Behind the church was a wilderness of rocks, wild grass, gullies and scrub oaks. No trace of the black shadow. Dan Reid stomped around in a circle, looking for any sign of movement and seeing none. Nothing! The very air drew tightly in close to him, and he found it nearly impossible to breathe.

The sheriff grabbed him at the shoulder and shook him to bring Dan back into the present moment. "Who was it?"

"Coulson," he whispered.

"Son-of-a-bitch. I'll get him, Reid. Don't you worry about that. You wanna be in on the posse?"

"Yeah. I sure do."

The sheriff clapped him on the shoulder. "Good. Meet in front of my office in half an hour. Bring whatever hardware you've got."

Dan plodded wearily back around the corner of the church, dreading what he'd see when he turned.

People gathered around the spot, thankfully blocking his view of the woman in gray sprawled in the bright green grass. Doc Kitzinger was fighting his way through them, yelling, "Let me see her!"

Britt stood alone, crying.

Dan Reid went and picked up his son, holding him tight, closing his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at the world without Betsy.

The school mistress shook him by the elbow. "She's alive! Dan, she's alive!"

"What? Thank God."

##

The posse assembled in front of the sheriff's office. Forty-five or fifty good men of the town sat mounted on their horses, waiting for instructions. Dan Reid packed a Winchester rifle, a Colt, and a Bowie knife he'd used back in the days when he rode with the Lone Ranger. He glanced back over his shoulder to the upstairs window of Doc Kitzinger's office and thought of the woman lying in the bed. He'd only looked at her for five minutes, but the image would stay with him forever. Betsy had ugly purple bruises on her creamy white throat. Her own brooch had gouged into her tender skin, drawing blood to stain the whole front of her white blouse. She had been unable to talk, but she was alive and that's what mattered.

Sheriff Kelly came out of his office, puffing his cigar and carrying a double-barreled shotgun. "Men? I won't lie to you. This man's dangerous. He's a ruthless murderer, a former train robber. He'll have no hesitation in gunning you down. Any man having second thoughts is free to go home to his family right now, and we won't think the less of you."

Not a single man stirred.

"All right. Raise your right hands, and I'll swear you in."

Dan Reid raised his hand, and repeated the oath in monotone, barely listening to his own words. Justice and law had very little meaning for him, right now. It was all so clear, what he had to do and what he was willing to do.

The only thing he couldn't understand was, where had his uncle gone?


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 10

For all of Christmas Day, and the week that followed, Sheriff Kelly and his posse searched in the pouring rain for a sign of the escaped murderer. They slugged their way through sandy puddles and literally beat the bushes around the groves of scrub oaks and sycamores that grew along the creek. The steady rains washed away his trail, they concluded. So it was, on the following Sunday, New Year's Eve of 1899, the posse straggled back into town dejected and disappointed that their abundance of guns and hatred had been of no use in tracking the murderer down.

Dan Reid lit white candles on his Christmas tree while Betsy sat in an armchair and watched. She was silent; even after a week, she couldn't talk. Her high lacy collar barely covered the bandages. Her auburn hair was braided Indian style in two thick ropes on either side of her head.

Their son Britt squealed with joy as he tore the plain brown paper away from his large Christmas present. "A bicycle! Oh, Pa, thank you!"

Dan forced a smile.

"Here's for you, honey." He brought his wife a sandalwood box made in the British colony of India.

Betsy opened it and revealed a sterling silver hat pin with a dainty glass honeybee on the tip. She neither smiled nor raised her face for the customary Christmas kiss. She just sat there, looking at it, and after a minute or so she closed the box again.

"Tomorrow morning, it's going to be the Twentieth Century. What do think of that, Britt?"

The little boy hopped onto the bicycle seat, right there in the parlor next to the piano. He tested his feet on the pedals, and his mother stirred not so much as a blink to scold him.

"When can I go riding my bicycle, Pa?"

"I suppose when it stops raining."

"When'll it stop raining, Pa?"

"I don't know. Soon."

Dan Reid started down the corridor toward the kitchen. A big pot of apple cider was simmering on the stove, and he intended to toss in a few cinnamon sticks and cloves before bringing some to Betsy.

Someone knocked on the front door. _I hope it's Christmas carolers; that might cheer her up a bit_, he thought as he returned to the foyer.

When he opened the door, he froze as if he'd seen a ghost. The Lone Ranger stood on his porch. "Good evening, Mr. Reid."

Dan blinked to be sure of what he was seeing: the white Stetson hat; the black felt mask; the canvas duster coat, blue cotton shirt, black leather vest, and Levi blue jeans tucked into horse boots. A double-holstered gun belt sagged low bearing a pair of Colt .45 pistols.

"My God," Dan breathed. "It can't be."

"May I come in, Mr. Reid?"

"Uh, of course."

Dan opened the door wider to a draft of cold rain. The Lone Ranger strolled inside as casual as you please. Spurs clinked on the hardwood floor. His silver-studded gun belt twinkled in the lamp light. He removed his white hat and the brim dripped speckles on the carpet. A receding hairline above the black mask showed a little more forehead than it used to, but other than that, he hadn't changed a bit.

Dan Reid fired questions, "What are you doing here? Where have you been? Why didn't you join the posse? We looked, and looked, for a week!"

"I know, Dan. I'm sorry you had to go through that for nothing."

A peculiar answer. So many questions log-jammed in Dan Reid's mind, he just stood there gawking at the masked man, unable to speak.

Britt popped out from the parlor. "Wow! Are you really the Lone Ranger?"

"I sure am, son. You must be Britt Reid."

"Wow! You know my name?"

The Lone Ranger went down on his knee to smile at the boy face-to-face. "I know you're an honest, courageous little boy. I heard you took care of your Ma when a bad man tried to hurt her."

Britt suddenly frowned, and tears welled up in his blue eyes. "I ran away."

"You went to get help. You did the right thing. You saved her life."

The boy's smile returned. Britt sniffed and wiped his face clean on his sleeve. "Do you really have silver bullets in your gun?"

"I sure do." The Lone Ranger pulled out a Colt, broke open the cylinder, and removed one of the bullets. "Here."

"Wow! Wait till I show this to my friend Hoi Lee! He's going to be so jealous!"

The Lone Ranger stood up, twirled his gun around his finger and dropped it neatly back into the holster. "Where's Mrs. Reid? I have something for her."

Betsy appeared at the doorway to the parlor, holding her fringed embroidered shawl around her shoulders. With her hair down, and in flat-heeled house slippers, she looked smaller than her normal self. Sadness had drawn dark circles around her eyes. Not even the sight of this masked man in her own home could coax a smile from those pinched, pale lips.

The Lone Ranger paused, obviously surprised at how grim she looked. "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Elizabeth."

Dan put his hand on the Lone Ranger's shoulder. "She still can't talk. Doc Kitzinger said it might be a couple of months before the damage to her throat is healed."

Britt held up his silver bullet. "Look, Ma! Look what the Lone Ranger gave me. Isn't it great?"

Betsy kept staring dead straight at the masked man.

"I brought you a Christmas present," the Lone Ranger said. "You'll have to put on a coat and shoes and come outside with me."

"It's raining," said Dan. "Can't it wait until morning?"

"No, Mr. Reid, it can't."

Britt ran for the coat rack first. "Can I come too?"

His mother shook her head, but Dan Reid said, "Sure. We'll all go outside and see."

It took a few minutes for them to bundle up in coats and boots and to get their umbrellas. The Lone Ranger led the way.

At the front gate, there stood a white horse. It wasn't an Arabian, and it wasn't even a stallion, but it was white – mostly – but for splotches of gray on the lips and ankles.

The Ranger snatched little Britt under the armpits and hoisted him onto the fancy black saddle.

"Look at me, Pa! I'm riding the Lone Ranger's horse!"

"You sure are, Son. How does it feel?"

"It feels great!" Britt kicked, his feet hanging only halfway to the stirrups. "Heigh-ho, Silver!"

The Lone Ranger led his horse by the bridle, walking. Dan Reid and his wife followed just behind under their matching black umbrellas. They strolled up the muddy street toward the middle of town.

"I didn't join the posse because, as I told you, the man you were after doesn't act like a typical outlaw. I knew you wouldn't find him in the usual places, camped out in gullies and heading for the Mexican border. He'd go to where ex-bounty hunters like Sheriff Kelly would never expect to find him."

Rain sizzled on the shingled roofs of the town. Most of the ground-level windows were dark, but upstairs there were lights: at Old Black Joe's apartment above the barber shop, at Mrs. Wagner's boarding house, and at Doc Kitzinger's office.

"My God, are you saying you got him?"

Britt laughed from high in the saddle. "Of course he got him, Pa. He's the Lone Ranger!"

They stopped at the sheriff's office. A light glowed from inside. The ranger tied up his white horse at the hitching post. He caught Britt by the shoulders as the boy eagerly slid down.

Deputy Yarnell opened the door for them, and he wore a smile as big as a kid holding the keys to Santa Claus's toy shop. "Hey there, Dan, Mrs. Reid. I see you met the Lone Ranger."

Betsy stepped in ahead of all of them. She alone made her way to the cage of iron bars at the back of the sheriff's office.

"He gave me a silver bullet!" little Britt bragged.

"Me too," said the deputy just as proudly.

A man imprisoned in the cell sat glumly on the hard bench. He still wore his fine, tailored clothes, a wool tweed suit and catalog-ordered Oxford loafers. His face had been knocked around a bit, with a cut lip and a swollen black eye to show for it. His left hand was bandaged, Dan assumed, from the ranger shooting a gun out of his hand.

The photographer looked up at her with utter hatred. "Look what you've done to me, you lil' whore. This is all your damned fault."

Dan Reid seized the bars in his hands. "That's my wife you're talking to, you cowardly murderer!"

The Lone Ranger gently pulled him back. "Don't let him get you angry, Dan. He's not worth it."

Betsy hoarsely whispered, "Whe-?"

"Where?" the Lone Ranger repeated. "Where did I catch him?"

She nodded.

"I found him at the Port of San Diego, waiting for a steamer ship to take him to London. The cab drivers and the bartenders and the baggage porters at the ticket office pointed him out. They all remembered him as the only cheapskate who didn't give anyone a _tip_ on Christmas."

Betsy stepped forward and lightly kissed the Lone Ranger on his cheek.

He actually blushed. "Now, Mrs. Reid, there's no need for that. I'm only seeing that justice is done."

The ranger headed for the door.

Deputy dogged his heels, asking, "Where're you going? Ain't you gonna stay and talk to the sheriff? He'll never believe me!"

"Don't worry, I'll be back to witness at the trial. You'll need my testimony to make sure Coulson hangs for his crimes. Right now, I've got other things to do. Adios."

Into the dark rain, he left them with only the memory of his bright smile. The pale horse galloped off. The patter of hooves blended into the drizzle.

Dan Reid put his arm behind his wife. "You see? How many times have I complained about those penny-dreadful paperbacks. He never said, 'Heigh-ho, Silver' in his life."

The End


End file.
